Kate Beaton's excellent autobiographical comic "Ducks": 2 Years in the Oil Sands (opens in new tab) has a scene in which an older worker asks for help with his e-mail. There is a scene in which an older worker asks for help with his e-mail. There are strange blank spaces in the e-mail, so he asks Beaton, a tech-savvy young man, for help. He is used to typewriters and doesn't know that computers handle line breaks on their own. It's a touching moment of bonding in an otherwise rather grim story.

According to a report in The Guardian (opens in new tab), this is not the kind of thing that happens in offices today. One 25-year-old publicist said he sought help from an older employee, a veteran of the copy room. Things like scanners and copiers are complicated," said Garrett Bemiller, explaining that the first time he used the copier in his New York office, "blank pages kept coming up and it took me a couple of times to realize that I had to put the paper upside down in the copier to get it to work."

According to a survey conducted by Dell of adults ages 18-26 (opens in new tab), "More than 1/3 of Generation Z feel that their schooling did not provide them with the technology skills they need for their planned careers. 56% have very basic or no digital skills training."

The survey also found that "more than half of the Z generation feels that schooling did not provide them with the technology skills they need for their planned careers.

The popular image of young people as digital natives who know how all technology works is a narrow stereotype. The generation that grew up using apps on their cell phones and owning laptops does not magically know how to use scanners, printers, and office mainstay desktop PCs. I remember being on work experience in high school and being asked to send faxes. [Max Simon, a 29-year-old content creator, told The Guardian. In a way, it's like discovering an ancient relic. "Simon, 29, knows more than his younger colleagues. "When I invite them to a Google Meet, they'll say, 'Oh, I've already invited them to a Google Meet,'" he said. But the link is already in the calendar invitation. It's 2023, and this is the world we live in. What seems so simple often catches Generation Z off guard."

As this millennial went on to say, "You can learn how to use TikTok in five seconds. You don't need an instruction manual like a printer. Now that content is so easily accessible, you can throw a simple curveball to someone and they will strike out and miss.

We've seen college professors tell us before that their students don't know what a file or folder is, thanks to the obfuscated file systems of smartphones and Apple devices and the power of modern search bars. Our own Evan Lahti pointed out that simple keyboard shortcuts broke the brains of his Generation Z colleagues, as those of us who were taught how to use a word processor in school no longer seem to be part of the curriculum.

On the positive side, younger employees have an advantage when it comes to dealing with office computers, even with external hardware and unfamiliar interfaces. Steve Bench, who organizes corporate workshops on generational differences, told The Guardian, "They're used to trial and error. They're used to trial and error. They may not be a godsend for workers, who automatically know how to work Excel, but they learn fast."